Theatre 
A Singer’s Notes 23: Three from the Bard(0)
The Winter’s Tale is the finest play by Shakespeare which nobody knows. Form and content meet and marry in this play. Everything is focused in a concentrated and clear line. The poet had two dry runs before writing the tale. Pericles, one of the most popular plays of the 17th century, is a rough-hewn rollicking tale which finds its heroine converting lechers and being lusted after by her own father. Next up, in the trial of romances, is Cymbeline, a complex rambling play with too many resurrections. The rightness of the The Winter’s Tale takes us by surprise. The themes of the last plays: separation, fathers and daughters, emotional destruction and rebirthing, here seem to have found a shape which sears itself into the mind. The most played and latest of the romances, The Tempest, can seem almost valedictory after Winter’s Tale.
Full Story»
Arthur Miller’s All My Sons at the Apollo Theatre
Missing in action. A play is greatly fortunate when it receives a performance better than it is. The current revival of Arthur Miller’s family drama from 1947, All My Sons, needs that kind of help. You hear hollow echoes throughout of socialist catch phrases and pat Depression-era notions about the working Joe as mythic hero. Money stinks. Bosses are glint-eyed bastards. In the Soviet system such virtuous cant was backed up by totalitarian terror: if you didn’t write a paean to the crews who built a new dam in Omsk, the secret police were ready to stimulate your inspiration with a midnight visit. Miller wanted to be a good leftist and a great writer at the same time. We can be thankful that his artistic ambitiousness won out. Otherwise, All My Sons would be like a Christmas pudding studded with thumbtacks — as it is, the action stops for mini sermons on one-worldism, war profiteers, the corrupting decay of capitalism, and so on. Finger wagging isn’t helpful when you aim to be the working-class Sophocles. Who cares if Oedipus paid his charioteer a decent wage at the crossroad to Thebes?
Spur of the Moment at the Royal Court Theatre
Her dark materials. I’m sure that the parents of Anya Reiss are bursting with pride that their daughter has written an acclaimed debut play, Spur of the Moment, at the unheard-of age of seventeen. But aren’t they horrified, too? As staged by the adventurous Royal Court Theatre, whose young writers program nurtured Reiss, the play is Ozzie and Harriet Burn in Hell. Their precocious offspring wasn’t just listening at doors to what the adults were squabbling about. She was prying into their psyches with sharpened tweezers, as coldly objective as Nabokov with his butterflies skewered and pinned on a board. Mums and dads across the land must be applying double insulation to their bedrooms.
La Bête by David Hirson at the Comedy Theatre, London
The muse unleashed. The wildest frolic in London is being had by Mark Rylance the first moment he wanders onstage as Valere, a street clown in 17th-century France. In his hand he clutches a glass of red wine and two pieces of green melon. A broken pheasant plume in his hat trails behind. Within thirty seconds he has burped, farted, spit, dribbled melon seeds on his chin, and retired to a commode, after which he wipes his bum with loose pages from a rival writer’s manuscript. For Valere is, unbelievably, a poet and playwright brought to farcical life as a bulging-eyed creature out of Hogarth – or as Rylance plays him, an entire menagerie of Hogarthian sots and loons. He commences on a rapid-fire soliloquy in rhyming couplets that lasts, without taking a breath, for twenty-five minutes.
More in this category
- Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane at The Young Vic
- Our Town Is More Than Ever: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at the Williamstown Theatre Festival
- Danton’s Death by Georg Büchner, directed by Michael Grandage, at the National Theatre, London
- Ödön von Horváth’s Judgment Day, at Bard College’s Summerscape
- Beyond the Horizon, by Eugene O’Neill at the National Theatre
- Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, A co-production of Walking the Dog Theatre and PS21, directed by David Anderson
